New middleware for new communities

2012-11-05

New middleware for new communities
Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Centre has signed an agreement with the EGI.eu (http://www.egi.eu/) to integrate the QosCosGrid (QCG) middleware stack into the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI).

QosCosGrid will extend the current capabilities of the EGI e-infrastructure by providing mechanisms for advance reservation and co-allocation of heterogeneous resources. QosCosGrid also provides end-user interfaces, including command-line tools, desktop clients and portal science gateways.

These functionalities are critical with respect to the MAPPER project, but they could also be beneficial for other communities.

“Bringing QosCosGrid into EGI means that the MAPPER research community will be able to make use of EGI resources with an EGI-wide guaranteed level of quality assurance and software maintenance,” says Michel Drescher, technical manager at EGI.eu.

“This is an important step to make EGI resources more attractive to a wider range of new user communities,” Drescher adds. “With QosCosGrid we will be able to support new users with different requirements than our existing communities.”
The QosCosGrid middleware is deployed within the Polish National Grid Initiative (PL-Grid) where it provides a unified interface for computing and storage resources offered by leading HPC centers in Poland. QosCosGrid is used on daily basis by many researchers in Poland coming from various research domains such as quantum chemistry, nanotechnology and bioinformatics.

“We hope that the deployment of QosCosGrid on EGI will offer additional resources for current users, but more importantly, that it will provide the opportunity to construct new challenging computing scenarios needed by other groups of scientists,” says Krzysztof Kurowski, director of the PSNC Applications Department where the QosCosGrid stack is developed.